New here? Just sign up with Google — your account includes Matilda, our gift book, forever.
Restart · Garden Heights
Part 3
for Restart · Part 3 · Chapters 9–12
8 Parts40 min
What Happens in Part 3
Community service brings Chase to Mr. Solway, a gruff war hero, while school sorts out who the new Chase really is.
Sentence BeginsThe bill for the old Chase comes due: he, Aaron, and Bear once pilfered fireworks for a stunt aimed at Joel Weber — the final blow that drove the Webers to send Joel far from home — and a judge has sentenced the three to community service at the Portland Street Assisted Living Residence. On their first shift, Nurse Duncan puts them on the snack cart.
Room 121Aaron and Bear treat the building as a joke, eating the merchandise and handing out mocking nicknames, while Chase keeps getting pulled into real work — adjusting beds, hunting lost remotes, listening. So he meets Mr. Solway, a gruff old veteran whose black-and-white photograph shows him receiving the Medal of Honor — the highest US military decoration — from President Truman; he grudgingly admits earning it in 1952 in the Korean War, though he claims not to recall the deed.
Kimberly's Fresh StartAt the pep rally, Kimberly Tooley — nursing a yearlong crush — notices Chase sitting with the video club, and when players pick on Brendan afterward, Chase steps in to defend him. Learning that amnesia has wiped the slate clean, Kimberly happily reintroduces herself and attaches to his new life. Shoshanna stays furious: to her, the polite new Chase is the same predator who emptied her brother's chair, now wearing a mask.
Benched, and HauntedAaron gets a chapter to grumble his side: the sentence is an outrage, and he cannot fathom why Chase trades stories with the crotchety warhorse in room 121. At a checkup, Dr. Cooperman pronounces Chase's body healed but bans football for the rest of the season — leaving him alone with vivid, unexplained fragments of memory that surface without their stories attached.
What We Will Learn
Section
What you will practice
Vocabulary
Courtrooms, medals, and small thefts: pilfer, restitution, mandatory, gruff, veteran…
Literary Elements
Rotating first-person narrators who each tell a self-serving version, dramatic irony built on a memory the reader has and Chase lacks, and foils — Aaron and Bear as the boys Chase used to be
Cross-Curricular
Bullying research — the roles scientists map in a bullying scene, why bystanders stay silent, what actually reduces bullying in schools, and how researchers measure something that hides from adults
Chapter Summary
Ch.
What happens
Chapter 9
Chase Ambrose — The three boys report to the Portland Street Assisted Living Residence to begin their court-ordered community service. Nurse Duncan puts them on the snack cart; Aaron and Bear pilfer the goods and mock the residents, while Chase drifts into actually helping — adjusting beds, finding lost remotes, calling nurses. In one room he spots a photograph of a young man receiving the Medal of Honor from President Truman. The gruff resident, Mr. Solway, grudgingly admits it was the Korean War, 1952 — and says he cannot recall the deed that earned it.
Chapter 10
Kimberly Tooley — At the pep rally, a girl who has crushed on Chase for a year spots him sitting with the video club instead of the football team. When players start picking on Brendan afterward, Chase steps in to protect him. Kimberly realizes Chase’s amnesia has erased the fact that they barely know each other — and treats the blank slate as her invitation.
Chapter 11
Aaron Hakimian — Chase’s old lieutenant is astounded by how much has changed. The service hours are an outrage to him, and he cannot fathom why Chase now spends them with the crotchety old warhorse in room 121, trading Korean War stories. To Aaron and Bear, the polite new Chase is an act that has to crack sooner or later.
Chapter 12
Chase Ambrose — Dr. Cooperman pronounces Chase’s body healed from the fall but bans football for the rest of the season — another head injury is a risk he cannot take. Meanwhile vivid fragments of memory keep surfacing without their stories attached, leaving Chase to wonder which boy the returning pieces belong to.
Part 1
Vocabulary
Study 10 key words from Chapters 9–12, then answer each question.
👥Knowledge Bank · The Cast of a Cruel Scene
Sociology · Peer RolesResearchers who study school bullying map it the way a director maps a stage. Dan Olweus — the Norwegian psychologist who founded the field — called that map the bullying circle, and it holds far more people than the two you would expect. At the center stand the aggressor, who starts the harm, and the target, who receives it. Around them stand assistants, who join in; reinforcers, who laugh, film, or cheer and so reward the cruelty; outsiders, who see everything and do nothing; and defenders, the rare few who step in or comfort the target afterward. The circle matters because it moves the question from character to position: in surveys, most students say they hate bullying, yet in the actual moment most behave as outsiders or reinforcers. Chase, Aaron, and Bear held the first three positions at their school for years. Joel Weber knows exactly what it costs to stand at the center as the target.
pilferv.Ch.9
To steal small things, a little at a time
“Aaron and Bear pilfer candy from the cart they are supposed to push.”
restitutionn.Ch.9
Payment or work that makes up for harm you caused
“The judge treated the service hours as restitution for the fireworks stunt.”
mandatoryadj.Ch.9
Required by a rule, a law, or an order
“The community service is mandatory, not a choice the boys made.”
gruffadj.Ch.9
Rough, blunt, and unfriendly in voice or manner
“Mr. Solway greets every visitor with a gruff bark.”
veterann.Ch.9
A person who has served in the armed forces
“Mr. Solway is a veteran of the Korean War.”
decoratedadj.Ch.9
Honored with medals for bravery or service
“The photograph proves the grumpy old man is a decorated hero.”
reluctantadj.Ch.9
Unwilling and hesitant about doing something
“Chase feels reluctant to disturb the growling stranger at first.”
sarcasticadj.Ch.11
Saying the opposite of what you mean, to mock
“Aaron stays sarcastic about every hour of the punishment.”
ordealn.Ch.11
A long, harsh, and difficult experience
“To Aaron, an afternoon of helping people is an unbearable ordeal.”
vividadj.Ch.12
Sharp, detailed, and lifelike
“A vivid flash of memory catches Chase off guard at the checkup.”
ⓘ The vocabulary words in this list are selected to help you understand and complete this workbook. Some may not appear verbatim in the original novel.
🧠Knowledge Bank question
1The Knowledge Bank explains that students who watch a target’s ordeal but do nothing are called ___.Ch.9
2‘Gruff’ describes a manner that is ___.Ch.9
3A ‘veteran’ is a person who has served in the armed forces.Ch.9
4If community service is ‘mandatory,’ it is ___.Ch.9
5Fill in each blank with the correct word.Ch.9
Word choices:restitutionreluctantgruffordeal- some words will not be used
The judge treated the service hours as for the damage the stunt caused.
Chase felt to disturb the growling stranger at first.
6A ‘decorated’ soldier is one who has ___.Ch.9
7A ‘sarcastic’ remark means exactly what it says, in a plain and sincere way.Ch.11
8An ‘ordeal’ is ___.Ch.11
9Fill in each blank with the correct word.Ch.9
Word choices:pilfervividveteranmandatory- some words will not be used
Aaron and Bear candy from the cart they are meant to push.
A flash of memory catches Chase off guard.
10A ‘vivid’ memory is sharp, detailed, and lifelike.Ch.12
Part 2
Comprehension
Show you understood what happens in Chapters 9–12.
👀Knowledge Bank · Why the Crowd Stays Quiet
Psychology · Bystander SilenceIn surveys, the great majority of students say bullying upsets them. So why do hallways full of decent people stay quiet? Psychologists point to three forces. The first is diffusion of responsibility — the sense that in a crowd, someone else will surely act — which lets every single watcher wait for a rescuer who never comes. The second is pluralistic ignorance — a spiral in which each onlooker reads the silence of the others as approval — so a room of secretly horrified students convinces itself that nobody minds. The third is plain fear: challenging a popular aggressor risks making yourself the next target, and students know it. The uncomfortable finding is that an audience does not merely fail to stop bullying; it fuels it, because laughter and attention are the aggressor’s reward. That is why Shoshanna’s open fury is so unusual, and why researchers spend less time studying the aggressor than the silent crowd.
🧠Knowledge Bank question
1According to the Knowledge Bank, ‘pluralistic ignorance’ is a spiral in which each onlooker ___.Ch.9
2What job does Nurse Duncan first give the three boys?Ch.9
3Aaron and Bear work harder than Chase does on their first day at the residence.Ch.9
4How do Aaron and Bear treat the residents?Ch.9
5Write the numbers 1–5 in the boxes to show the correct order of events. Number 1 = what happens first.Chapters 9–12
Dr. Cooperman rules out football for the rest of the season.
The three boys report to Nurse Duncan for their first shift.
Chase spots the Medal of Honor photograph and meets Mr. Solway.
At the pep rally, Kimberly notices Chase sitting with the video club.
Aaron and Bear start helping themselves to the snack cart.
6Joel Weber now goes to school far from home because the bullying made staying impossible.Chapters 9–12
7What does Chase learn about Mr. Solway?Ch.9
8Why does Kimberly Tooley treat Chase’s amnesia as good news?Ch.10
9Shoshanna is furious that the video club lets Chase join.Chapters 9–12
10What does Dr. Cooperman tell Chase at his checkup?Ch.12
Part 3
Literary Elements
Understanding HOW and WHY Gordon Korman tells the story across Chapters 9–12.
🏫Knowledge Bank · Slower Than a Poster
Education · School ClimateSchools have thrown almost everything at bullying: one-time assemblies, zero-tolerance expulsions, motivational posters. Research is blunt about most of it — a single assembly changes almost nothing, and harsh punishment alone often just teaches aggressors to be sneakier. What works is slower and less dramatic. Meta-analyses — studies that pool the results of many other studies — find that whole-school programs cut bullying by roughly twenty percent. The successful programs share ingredients. Every adult in the building enforces the same clear rules. Supervision increases in the unwatched hotspots — hallways, buses, locker rooms — where incidents actually happen. Students practice acting as defenders instead of as an audience, which matters most of all, because bullying feeds on spectators. And targets get a private, safe way to report, since public reporting invites revenge. The lesson from decades of data is that bullying is not beaten by one hero, one assembly, or one rule, but by a changed climate.
Rotating Narration
Every chapter is first-person, but the microphone keeps moving — Chase, Kimberly, Aaron — and each voice is honest about some things and blind about others.
Dramatic Irony
The reader carries the history Chase cannot remember, so we see Kimberly’s trick and Shoshanna’s reasons while Chase only sees smiles and fury.
Foil
Aaron and Bear keep behaving exactly the way the old Chase did, so every scene with them measures how far the new Chase has moved.
🧠Knowledge Bank question
1The Knowledge Bank says the ingredient that matters most in successful anti-bullying programs is ___.Chapters 9–12
2The reader knowing what a character cannot know is called ___.Ch.10
3A foil is a character whose contrast makes another character’s traits stand out.Ch.11
4Kimberly’s chapter creates dramatic irony mainly because ___.Ch.10
5Fill in each blank with the correct literary term.Ch.11
Word choices:foilironynarratorflashback- some words will not be used
Aaron’s unchanged behavior makes him a to the new Chase.
Each chapter of the novel has a different .
6Bear and Aaron mainly serve as foils because they ___.Ch.11
7Hearing the same days described by different narrators can change how the reader judges events.Chapters 9–12
8Chase hearing strangers describe his own past mainly creates ___.Chapters 9–12
9Fill in each blank with the correct literary term.Ch.10
Word choices:ironyfoilsuspensesetting- some words will not be used
Kimberly exploiting an amnesia only she understands is dramatic .
Mr. Solway’s hallway at Portland Street is part of the novel’s .
10In literature, a foil and a villain are the same thing.Ch.11
Part 4
Think Deeper
Four deeper challenges — no single-word recall. Read, weigh the evidence, and reason it out.
📊Knowledge Bank · Counting the Invisible
Research Methods · MeasurementHow do you count something that hides from adults? Bullying happens in stairwells, group chats, and locker rooms — precisely where teachers are not — so counting office referrals misses most of it. Researchers rely instead on anonymous self-report surveys: every student in a school answers, privately, questions such as how often they have been targeted in the past month, with a clear definition printed first so that a one-time argument is not counted. A second tool is peer nomination, in which students confidentially name classmates who bully or are bullied; honest patterns emerge because the whole grade is reporting, and no single accuser is exposed. Careful studies repeat the same survey for years, which is how we know that bullying peaks in middle school and that most incidents are never reported to any adult. When a school claims its program works, researchers ask: compared with what? Without honest measurement, a quiet hallway may only mean better hiding.
Picture a boy pushing a snack cart past doors with handrails, in a building that smells of coffee and disinfectant, while his two best friends stuff their pockets with the candy they are supposed to be handing out. Nobody in this hallway is here by choice. The three boys are working off a court sentence, and the sentence has a story behind it: pilfered fireworks, a stunt aimed at a boy named Joel Weber, and a family that finally sent their son to a school far away just to get him clear of Chase Ambrose. The strange part is that Chase cannot remember any of it. He is meeting his own reputation the way you would meet a stranger — in other people’s flinches, in a girl’s fury at the video club, in a judge’s paperwork. And behind one door at the end of the hall sits an old man with a growl like a guard dog and a photograph of a president on his wall, about to become the most important friendship in this book.
Original passage written for Garden Heights — not a quotation from the novel.
1Claim: “Part 3 shows that the old Chase’s cruelty was a long campaign, not a single prank gone wrong.” — choose the two details that best prove it.Claim & Evidence
2Evidence of the old Chase, or Signs of a new Chase? Tap each detail to send it left or right.Sort into two
◄ Evidence of the old ChaseSigns of a new Chase ►
3Match each cause to its result. For each cause, pick its result.Cause & Effect
The boys pilfer fireworks and pull their stunt→
Years of torment close in on Joel Weber→
Chase treats the residents like people, not chores→
Chase’s amnesia erases their shared history→
🧠Knowledge Bank question
4Fill both blanks to complete the reasoning.Build the Argument
The Knowledge Bank explains that researchers use anonymous surveys because , which means a quiet hallway may only prove that .
Part 5
Standardized Test
The Hallway Audience · Reading & Vocabulary · SAT & TOEFL-style practice
Read the passage — the highlighted words are tested — then answer. Tap an answer, then tap it again to confirm.
SATCentral Ideas — the passage's main point
SATInference — a conclusion the passage implies
SATAuthor’s Purpose — what the author wants to achieve
SATWords in Context — a word's meaning in this passage
TOEFLFactual Information — a fact stated in the passage
TOEFLVocabulary — a tested word's meaning here
The Hallway Audience
Ask a researcher what bullying is, and you will not get a vague answer. Since the 1970s, scientists have defined it by three tests: the harm is deliberate, it is repeated over time, and it flows across an imbalance of power — in size, in numbers, or in popularity. The definition matters because it separates bullying from ordinary conflict; two friends who argue are not a bullying case, but a celebrated athlete who torments a smaller classmate for months is. Once the definition was fixed, researchers could finally count the problem, and the counts were sobering: in anonymous school surveys, roughly one student in five reports enduring the ordeal of being bullied.
The next discovery was that bullying is rarely a private crime. Observers stationed in schoolyards found that peers were present in more than eight out of ten incidents, and that the audience is not scenery — it is fuel. Some onlookers assist the aggressor, and some reinforce the behavior by laughing, cheering, or filming. Most simply watch, and their silence is not approval. Bystanders report that they are reluctant to act because responsibility feels divided among the whole crowd, and because anyone who objects risks becoming the next target.
Yet the audience is also where the solution hides. When researchers timed real incidents, they found that most bullying stops within about ten seconds once a peer decides to intervene — far faster than when an adult arrives. Whole-school programs therefore spend less energy lecturing aggressors and more energy turning silent onlookers into defenders, and reviews of dozens of these programs show bullying falling by roughly twenty percent. A hallway is a kind of vote, these researchers argue, and cruelty is sustained or starved by the crowd that watches it.
Original passage written for Garden Heights — not a quotation from the novel.
1What is the main idea of the passage?SAT · Central Ideas
2According to the passage, researchers count harm as bullying only when it is ___.TOEFL · Factual Information
3The passage says that in most bullying incidents, peers ___.TOEFL · Factual Information
4Which situation would the researchers in the passage most likely NOT count as bullying?SAT · Inference
5According to the passage, bystanders often stay silent because they ___.TOEFL · Factual Information
6Why does the author include the finding about bullying stopping within about ten seconds?SAT · Author’s Purpose
7The comparison of a hallway to a vote suggests that ___.SAT · Inference
8In the passage, intervene most nearly means ___.SAT · Words in Context
9In the passage, reluctant most nearly means ___.TOEFL · Vocabulary
10In the passage, ordeal most nearly means ___.TOEFL · Vocabulary
Part 6 · Optional
Creative Writing
A bonus challenge to practice your English. Take your time and have fun with it.
About This Section
This writing task is optional and is not part of your auto-graded score. The feedback below checks only the basics — length, spelling, and grammar — not whether your ideas are right or wrong. It is meant for classroom discussion and creative practice, so feel free to use your imagination!
Writing Task — Part 3 “The Hallway Vote”
Research says most bullying happens in front of an audience — and that it usually stops within seconds when even one watcher steps in. Write about a moment when you were part of the audience: you saw someone teased, excluded, or shamed. What did you do, what did you want to do, and what held you back or pushed you forward? 6–10 sentences. End by telling your past self what to do next time — or why you would do the same thing again.
You can start with: “Everyone was watching, and that included me...”
0 / 40 words minimum
🗣 Teach It · Just for Fun (optional)
No right or wrong — close the screen and tell someone nearby what happened in this part. Can’t find anyone? Tell yourself out loud. The moment you teach it, you truly understand it.
Independent study guide by Garden Heights. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Gordon Korman. Contains original analysis only; no text from the novel is reproduced. Reference text: This workbook follows Gordon Korman’s classic text (the standard Puffin edition sold worldwide). Revised 2023 UK editions change some wording and may not match the vocabulary studied here.
